Systems and methods herein generally relate to self-navigating mobile printers, and more particularly to mobile printers that have the ability to make autonomous decisions.
With the advances in robotics and self-navigating devices, self-drive units have been attached to conventional printers to allow such devices to travel to locations where printing is needed. Such self-drive units commonly include powered drive wheels and/or tracks, steering mechanisms, various sensors (e.g., optical, sonic, magnetic, contact, etc.) that help the self-drive unit steer around obstacles. Additionally, conventional self-drive units include on-board maps and/or logic devices (hardware and/or software) that allows the self-drive unit to autonomously navigate known or unknown environments, which allows the self-drive unit to travel from its current position to a desired destination, with or without external assistance.
For example, with existing systems various users can submit print jobs to a server that is in communication with and directs the actions of multiple self-drive mobile printers. The print server dispatches such mobile printers to the locations of the users who submitted the print jobs to allow the mobile printer to travel to the users and output each user's print job directly to the user. This increases user satisfaction by saving the user from the inconvenience of walking to a centralized printer every time printed output is needed, allowing the users to focus their time and energies on other tasks.
However, such mobile printers have limited capabilities because of weight, size, and power concerns. Specifically, the mobile printers must be small enough to navigate narrow walkways, and such devices operate on limited battery power supplies, etc. Therefore, these mobile printers should be lightweight and therefore have limited print media storage capabilities, utilize lighter-weight and smaller components (that are potentially slower and/or produce lower quality printing), etc. Therefore, such mobile printers can have higher operating costs, slower performance, etc. Also, such mobile printers may not have the ability to print larger quantities of sheets because they often carry less printing supplies in order to remain compact and lightweight.